Rambling, rumbling, rumination

Blizzard’s F2P Plans: RealID

In simpler terms, we pay for our entertainment in one way or another. So-called “Free to Play” games (F2P) tend to either ask for money in bite-sized chunks (microtransactions) or ask you to earn your goodies by playing for a longer time than other players (paying with time), or maybe even “offer wall” points from a third party or some such gibberish. Some games ask for both money and time. A rarer game might try to be advertisement-based, running with a network TV/Google approach to monetization; get the eyeballs in and inundate them with advertising spam.

Perhaps now we get to see another way to pay for our MMO crack, er, service: with your identity.

Combine that with a /complain function and no nonsense moderation, and you’ll clean things up without all those nasty, tricksy unintended consequences and Facebook diseases on the way down the slippery slope.

20 Responses

One thing that may be heading for us further down that slope is criminalisation of people who lie about their name online. If you’re supposed to be paying for a service with identity then the thousands of Brad Pitts and Megan Foxes are scamming companies into getting the service for free.

So it would be logical for these companies to lobby to get mis-identifying yourself to them made illegal.

[…] and well spoken bloggers usually weigh in. I usually refrain from joining in because those people say it so much better than I could and usually have it covered. This is different, and I think it […]

I said it on Spinks’ blog and I’ll say it wherever I remember to repeat it…

I cannot stress enough, “Vote with your wallet.” If you disagree with what they are doing, cancel your WoW account, cancel your Starcraft II pre-order. Outrage is fine, but businesses listen more to accountants and spreadsheets. You have to affect the bottom line to really get their ear.

[…] Blizzard’s RealID isn’t the end of the world, but neither is it wise. It is a step away from my dream of a meritocratic community and an interesting game world. It is yet another piece of the puzzle of the bizarre corporatocracy in our fraying country, and a look at the arrogant mindset of those who make the rules and who have the money. The strangest part of all this isn’t that Blizzard is doing this, it’s that they honestly don’t seem to understand the implications. […]

Then again, I’ve been rather set against the whole “games as a service” bit for a while now. This isn’t quite the endgame I imagined, but it is a logical extension of the unholy merger of products and services.

[…] yes, I just used Star Trek and a fan film as a springboard to obliquely refer to a game company’s statist behavior and warn against fascism clothed in feel-good stated intentions. Yes, I think that Blizzard using […]